In May 2026, Sundance Square — the 37-block core of downtown Fort Worth — did something it had never done before: it hired an outside firm, JLL, to lease its own retail space.^[1] For a private company handling over 100,000 square feet of storefronts inside a 3.7-million-square-foot district, that shouldn't be notable. It was, because for years brokers had said the opposite problem was the point — that Sundance Square's owners didn't list vacant space anywhere a tenant might actually find it.^[2]

The district isn't owned by a REIT, a pension fund, or a public authority. It's owned by two people: Ed and Sasha Bass.

How two people came to own the middle of a city

The Bass fortune traces to Sid W. Richardson, a Fort Worth wildcatter and the great-uncle of the four Bass brothers — not their grandfather, a detail that gets flattened in casual retellings. Richardson's nephew and business partner, Perry Bass, inherited the oil and ranching fortune when Richardson died in 1959.^[3] Perry's four sons — Sid, Ed, Robert, and Lee — split into entirely separate investment careers. Robert built his own operation, later Keystone Group, with a hand in what became Oak Hill Capital Partners. Sid took on downtown Fort Worth.

After Radio Shack founder Charles Tandy died in 1978 having started rebuilding downtown, Sid Bass picked up where he left off: finishing Tandy's hotel project, building the twin City Center office towers, and assembling what became Sundance Square^[3] — named, by local lore, for the Sundance Kid, who is said to have passed through Fort Worth with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch.^[4] The acquisition and renovation work is documented from the late 1970s onward;^[1] no source gives an exact starting date, and none of the coverage confirms precisely when the name was adopted.

For nearly forty years, ownership sat across the family. Then in November 2019, Ed and Sasha Bass bought out Sid and Lee's stake and took full, 100 percent ownership of Sundance Square through their family office, Fine Line Group — while the separate City Center towers stayed jointly owned by all four.^[5] No source, anywhere, discloses what Ed and Sasha paid for that buyout. That's not a gap in the reporting. It's the actual condition of the asset: a private transaction, between family members, with no public filing requirement attached to it at all.

What sits inside the same 37 blocks, and isn't actually theirs

One landmark inside the district complicates the picture, deliberately: Bass Performance Hall, named for Ed Bass's parents, is owned and operated by a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Performing Arts Fort Worth — not by Fine Line Group.^[6] The Fort Worth Symphony, Texas Ballet Theater, Fort Worth Opera, and the Van Cliburn competition operate there as independent tenants, each running its own books. The hall sits inside Sundance Square geographically. Institutionally, it answers to a nonprofit board, audited financials, and public accountability the commercial core next door was never structured to carry. The family built both. It chose transparency for one and not the other.

The recusal, and the hire

The clearest evidence of what that choice costs isn't a leasing dispute. It's what happened to the city's own top administrator.

In September 2022, then-City Manager David Cooke and his spouse flew to Aspen on a private jet with Ed and Sasha Bass, undisclosed until a Fort Worth Report investigation surfaced it. City Council members called it "questionable judgment." The city attorney found no formal ethics violation — but Cooke recused himself from all city business touching Sundance Square, including the Downtown Public Improvement District, for the rest of his tenure.^[7] Asked about it at the time, Cooke put it plainly: "Some of this is all about perception because we are friends…. So, we socialize together. And so it's incumbent on me then on the decision-making part of the city to make sure that stuff is done above board."^[8]

Cooke stepped down in February 2025 after eleven years, the longest tenure of any city manager in Fort Worth's history. Two months later, in May 2025, the Bass family hired him to lead Sundance Square's management.^[7] Reached for comment, Cooke, Sasha Bass, and a Sundance Square spokesperson all declined. So did several sitting council members. The ones willing to speak split cleanly: Fort Worth Chamber board chair Brian Newby called Cooke's management skill "a perfect match"; council member Gyna Bivens dismissed the conflict-of-interest question outright — "Anybody complaining about that needs to wake up and go do something worthwhile. Go scoop soup or something." A former Sundance tenant, Dr. Marie Holliday, was warier: "It's just all about whether or not protocol will continue to be followed."^[7]

It's not an isolated pattern, either — Sundance Square's current head of security is also a former senior Fort Worth city official, hired the same way, after his own public-sector career ended.^[7]

The part that was never hidden — it just never had to be explained

None of this required Sundance Square to break a rule. City ethics code didn't formally cover the jet trip. Nothing legally compelled disclosure of the 2019 buyout price. There's no requirement that a private landlord list its own vacancies. Every piece of the district's opacity is simply the default condition of a family fully owning something with no shareholders, no board it doesn't appoint itself, and no regulator whose job is to ask.

By 2024, downtown Fort Worth's own retail vacancy had climbed toward one in four storefronts, well above the surrounding metro's rate — and Sundance Square Management held more empty storefronts than any other single downtown owner: 20.^[9] Shane Smith of Downtown Fort Worth Inc. described the arrangement from the outside about as bluntly as anyone on record has: "We just trust that whatever they're doing is according to their own plans and their own agenda, their own idea."^[10]

That's not a criticism of the Bass family's management specifically — Sundance Square is, by any visible measure, one of the more successful private downtown redevelopments in the country, and the JLL hire suggests its owners noticed the vacancy problem themselves and moved to fix it. It's a description of the structure underneath the management: a private family owns the physical center of a major American city, and whether that ownership is exercised well or poorly is left entirely to the family's own judgment, checked by nothing but its own reputation.